“What is all this?”
Dr. Hu adjusted his glasses. “You could choose to work for DARPA,” he said with a hyena grin, “or … you could come work for us.”
“But … but who are you? What is all this?”
“It’s something so new that it doesn’t even have a name,” he said. “We’ve been calling it the Department of Military Sciences as a kind of placeholder name. Something to put on congressional memos.” Dr. Hu stepped out and then turned and offered her his hand. “How would you like to help us save the world?”
Part Three
Burn to Shine
They played at hearts as other children might play at ball;
only, as it was really their two hearts that they flung to and fro,
they had to be very, very handy to catch them, each time, without hurting them.
—GASTON LEROUX, The Phantom of the Opera
Chapter Eleven
The Locker
Sigler-Czajkowski Biological and Chemical Weapons Facility
Highland County, Virginia
Sunday, August 31, 4:44 a.m.
On the day that she died, Dr. Noor Jehan had a premonition.
It was not an unusual thing with her, though she’d had them less often as an adult than when she was a little girl in Punjab. Since coming to America with her parents at age thirteen, her premonitions, once an almost daily occurrence, faded to a scattered few. They were rarely anything of note. She would look up a few seconds before a doorbell rang, or she’d take her cell phone out of her purse and hold it, knowing that a call was coming. A few times she bought scratch-off lottery tickets on a whim. Once she won fifty dollars and another time she won five hundred.
Like that.
Nothing that rocked her world. No insights into matters of any consequence heavier than the early arrival of a traveling aunt or the tie color of a blind date.
There were three exceptions.
The first was when she was eight years old. Noor woke from a sound sleep and cried out for her brother. His name, Amrit, burst from her and the sound of it pulled her from a dream of drowning. In the dream it was Noor who was sinking beneath black waves as the sodden weight of her sari pulled her down to coldness and invisibility and death. But as she woke, she knew—with perfect clarity and absolute certainty—that it was Amrit who had drowned.
Amrit was a petty officer about the INS Viraat , India’s only aircraft carrier—a Centaur-class ship bought from the British and serving as flagship for India’s fleet. It was vast, strong, and as safe as an island. That was what Amrit said in his letters.
But at that moment, the young Noor sat bathed in sweat, as drenched as if she had been sinking in salt water, and knew that Amrit was lost. It was almost two days before the men from the Ministry of Defence came to their house to break her mother’s heart. There had been an accident, they said. A crane had come loose from its moorings, the big iron sweep had knocked a dozen men into the ocean. Six were pulled out alive, and six had died. They were sorry, they said; so sorry.
The second time was a month before the Jehan family packed and moved to America. Noor had been at school, copying math problems from the blackboard, when a bus suddenly crashed through the wall and killed her. Only it wasn’t like that. She woke up in the school nurse’s office, screaming about a bus, but nothing at all had happened at the school. However, that evening on the news it was reported that a tourist bus had been in a terrible accident with a tractor-trailer filled with microwave ovens. The driver of the truck apparently had had a heart attack and fallen forward, his dead foot pressing on the accelerator, his slumping body turning the wheel. The truck hit the bus side-on. Nineteen people were killed, thirty-six were injured. The following afternoon her father received a call from his mother saying that his brother, Noor’s uncle, had been a passenger on that bus and had been crushed to death.
That second terrible premonition had been nearly thirty years
Dr. Hu adjusted his glasses. “You could choose to work for DARPA,” he said with a hyena grin, “or … you could come work for us.”
“But … but who are you? What is all this?”
“It’s something so new that it doesn’t even have a name,” he said. “We’ve been calling it the Department of Military Sciences as a kind of placeholder name. Something to put on congressional memos.” Dr. Hu stepped out and then turned and offered her his hand. “How would you like to help us save the world?”
Part Three
Burn to Shine
They played at hearts as other children might play at ball;
only, as it was really their two hearts that they flung to and fro,
they had to be very, very handy to catch them, each time, without hurting them.
—GASTON LEROUX, The Phantom of the Opera
Chapter Eleven
The Locker
Sigler-Czajkowski Biological and Chemical Weapons Facility
Highland County, Virginia
Sunday, August 31, 4:44 a.m.
On the day that she died, Dr. Noor Jehan had a premonition.
It was not an unusual thing with her, though she’d had them less often as an adult than when she was a little girl in Punjab. Since coming to America with her parents at age thirteen, her premonitions, once an almost daily occurrence, faded to a scattered few. They were rarely anything of note. She would look up a few seconds before a doorbell rang, or she’d take her cell phone out of her purse and hold it, knowing that a call was coming. A few times she bought scratch-off lottery tickets on a whim. Once she won fifty dollars and another time she won five hundred.
Like that.
Nothing that rocked her world. No insights into matters of any consequence heavier than the early arrival of a traveling aunt or the tie color of a blind date.
There were three exceptions.
The first was when she was eight years old. Noor woke from a sound sleep and cried out for her brother. His name, Amrit, burst from her and the sound of it pulled her from a dream of drowning. In the dream it was Noor who was sinking beneath black waves as the sodden weight of her sari pulled her down to coldness and invisibility and death. But as she woke, she knew—with perfect clarity and absolute certainty—that it was Amrit who had drowned.
Amrit was a petty officer about the INS Viraat , India’s only aircraft carrier—a Centaur-class ship bought from the British and serving as flagship for India’s fleet. It was vast, strong, and as safe as an island. That was what Amrit said in his letters.
But at that moment, the young Noor sat bathed in sweat, as drenched as if she had been sinking in salt water, and knew that Amrit was lost. It was almost two days before the men from the Ministry of Defence came to their house to break her mother’s heart. There had been an accident, they said. A crane had come loose from its moorings, the big iron sweep had knocked a dozen men into the ocean. Six were pulled out alive, and six had died. They were sorry, they said; so sorry.
The second time was a month before the Jehan family packed and moved to America. Noor had been at school, copying math problems from the blackboard, when a bus suddenly crashed through the wall and killed her. Only it wasn’t like that. She woke up in the school nurse’s office, screaming about a bus, but nothing at all had happened at the school. However, that evening on the news it was reported that a tourist bus had been in a terrible accident with a tractor-trailer filled with microwave ovens. The driver of the truck apparently had had a heart attack and fallen forward, his dead foot pressing on the accelerator, his slumping body turning the wheel. The truck hit the bus side-on. Nineteen people were killed, thirty-six were injured. The following afternoon her father received a call from his mother saying that his brother, Noor’s uncle, had been a passenger on that bus and had been crushed to death.
That second terrible premonition had been nearly thirty years
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